1.
Create a SEO Keyword Field in Product Database:
Just as every product record in your catalog has a
name, price, and other attributes, you should also create
a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags,
meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add
products to the site, enter commonly search for
keywords in this field.
Not everyone will search by the brand name or item
number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank
for long tail searches.

2.
Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page:
 As a general rule, I try to optimize for plural keywords on the home
page or other SEO landing pages.
Focus on singular terms on the product pages by using the SEO
keyword field mentioned in step 2.

3.
Simple Product & Category URLs:
 Ideally, URLs should consist of keywords, not useless ID’s or other
parameters.
 If you don’t have the option of using URL re-writing software, at
least limit the number of variables passed in the URL.

4.
All Products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page:
 Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source
of PageRank.
 Many sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of
pages of categories and subcategories. This can be accomplished by
using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per
page.

5.
Unique Title Tags:
While it’s debatable whether the company name belongs in the
beginning of the title tag, most agree you should not include extra
keywords that are repeated in every tag.
For example, if you company name was XYZ Travel, include only the
company name in title tag, not “XYZ Travel Agency and Vacations.” Use
as little duplicate content as possible in order to prevent diluting the
value of the rest of the text in the title tag.

6.
Unique Keyword Meta Tags:
 Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely
unique on every product page.
Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your
ranking, unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In
addition, don’t stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant
to the specific page they are on.

7.
Unique Keyword Meta Tags:
 Meta tags, including keywords and description, should be entirely
unique on every product page.
Though meta content likely doesn’t directly affect your ranking,
unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties. In addition, don’t
stuff keywords into your meta tags that aren’t relevant to the specific
page they are on.

8.
Pass PR Wisely:
Obviously, not every page on your site deserves the same link juice.
While your Return policy page is important, it likely won’t bring in loads
of revenue driving traffic from organic search.
Make sure your primary SEO pages, (category and products pages)
receive most of the PR flow by capping PR flow on less important links.
You can accomplish this via Javascript links, form submit links, the nofollow tag, or the robots.txt file.

9.
Avoid Manufacturer Product Descriptions:
It’s tempting to just copy and paste from the manufacturer’s website,
but resist the urge.
 At the very least, re-write the description in some way to make it
unique.

10.
Product Tagging:
With the advent of social media, customers have become
accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag
products with their own keywords.
 When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking
for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.

11.
Page File Names:
 If possible, use keyword rich page file names.
 A page files name such as www.yoursite.com/keyword-phrasehere.html tells Googlebot a lot more than a URL such as
www.yoursite.com/?ID=1234.

12.
Use iframes for Duplicate Content:
If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or
your product descriptions are not unique, consider placing them inside
an iframe with an invisible border.
Users will not know that they data technically resides on another
page search engines will not penalize you for duplicate content.

13.
Links in Product Descriptions:
Create keyword rich links from within the product descriptions of one
product linking to another.
 I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail
keywords.

14.
Crawlable Navigation:
Avoid JavaScript or css based navigation structures that don’t allow
spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your
navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks.
 In additional, don’t rely on form based navigation such as drop
down lists since the SEs can’t follow them.

15.
Don’t Stuff Keywords in your Naviagtion:
This is useless and very tacky.
Keywords that show up universally in the navigation on every page
are not as important as they used to be. Instead, use keyword rich
anchor text pointing to your important pages within a paragraph of
relevant text.

16.
Don’t Use “View” or “More”:
 On your product category pages, make sure you link to the individual
product pages with anchor text that contains more than just words like
“View” or “See more”.
Vague terms such as these tell spiders nothing about your products.

17.
Optimize your Images:
With images now popping up in the regular SERPs, every image on
your site should be optimized.
 Make sure all your product images contain unique alt text attributes.
By simply populating the alt text with the product and brand name, I’ve
seen a huge increase in traffic from Google Image search. In addition,
you’re making your site more useable for the vision impaired.

18.
Optimize your Internal Site Search:
 This is more of a usability tip, but it applies perfectly within the
context of eCommerce SEO. Because your visitor found your site via a
search engine, they will likely expect your internal site search to work
as well.
I’ve found that many first time visitors landing your site from a SERP
will search for the exact same term they typed into Google.

19.
Create Brand Landing Pages:
If your site sells branded products that customers may be searching
for, setup a optimized landing page for every brand.

20.
Use Title Attributes in Links:
 For all anchor text on your site, be sure to use appropriate title
attributes (e.g. <a href=”page.html” mce_href=”page.html”
title=”keywords here”>) in order to provide search engines more
information about what the page contains.
Although not nearly as important as the actual anchor text, title
attributes are factored into the ranking algorithm in some way.

21.
Track Page Yield:
In order to determine the effectiveness of your site as a whole, take
the number of unique keywords you are found for during a given time
period.
Then, divide that by the number pages indexed by Google. This will
give you your page yield, a good metric for measuring the length of
your “long tail.”

22.
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Created by
Ashwin